Thursday, November 15, 2012

Purgatory Sucks

I have no idea what to expect on Sunday.None.

I’ve started ¾ of my posts like that this season and yeah, I’m
sick of it too but that is the strange and terrible world we live in and so
what the hell am I supposed to do?This
is a savage purgatory we find ourselves trapped in, neither lousy enough to
double down on The Grim and start perversely entertaining ourselves with
maudlin soap-operas about monkeys eating Rod Marinelli’s colostomy bag and
wailing songs to soothe the rage of our idiot souls, nor good enough to press
forward with an agenda of Hope and sunshine and rainbows and candy and blowjobs
and puppies and puppies giving blowjobs.There is nothing definitive about it.It is neither heaven nor hell.Instead it is just . . . purgatory.

I feel trapped.I don’t
like feeling trapped.I have no idea if
the Lions will beat the Packers on Sunday or if they will lose by twenty, and
what’s worse is that I’m not sure it matters even if they do win.I’m suffering from a goddamn existential
crisis as a fan here.This season feels
like it is without meaning and there is a stark, naked sense of horror that accompanies
that realization.

I used to love this team.They seemed like they were having fun, fighting the demons of the past
with us, and as soon as they grew up and became men the world would explode
with colors we never knew existed.Today, I hate half the team.They
seem petulant, vaguely hung-over week after week and it has become clear that
many of them will never grow up.They
will remain rambunctious little boys, their promise twisted into something
gross and ugly, wastrels living off a barely earned reputation, squeezing every
last drop they can from a tiny, tiny stone.In short, they seem to have contracted the dreaded Lions Disease.

Yes, it’s true.In my
expert medical opinion(I spent 7 years
at an unpronounceable medical school in the Yucatan, treating natives two days
a month for various blow-dart related maladies and the other 28 or 29, depending
on the month, carrying on like Caligula on the beaches of Cancun and Playa del
Carmen.On Sundays we’d take a boat out
to Cozumel and we’d have an orgy.A
native girl would be sacrificed to the old gods and we’d drink her blood and
the knowledge of her family would thus become infused with ours and then on Monday
morning we’d take the boat back to the mainland and heal the sick so don’t you
dare question my medical pedigree.)the
current Lions have been infected with the same highly contagious disease that
has plagued Lions Land for the last half-century.Perhaps we needed to be more vigilant in our
eradication efforts when we went in with a flamethrower and torched the place
after the Great Plague of 2008.Sure, we
hacked the Millen host into a billion little pieces and then shot them into the
sun but we allowed certain carriers to persist, the Raiolas, the Backuses,
etc.Perhaps it was out of some misplaced
desire to be merciful, perhaps we were merely too naïve . . . who can say for
sure?All I know is that we failed and
now that disease is spreading once again and once it starts there is nothing
that can be done.

That is the closest I have come to declaring this whole
thing a failure, and that might seem like a hysterical overreaction, but
frankly I am not interested in justifying how I feel anymore.We have been through this too many times
before and I’m not going to pretend.No
sir.This is all so much bullshit and it
fucking stinks and anyone who says that it doesn’t is either an incurable
optimist who will never, ever admit these horrible truths or they’re clinically
insane masochists.Possibly both.If you’re one of those who is an incurable
optimist, I tip my cap to you.You are a
good person and I wish you nothing but the best.Your pursuit of happiness even in the face of
madness is to be commended.But most of
us can’t take this shit.Most of us
believe that we deserve something better, that constantly moving the goalposts
inward in order to justify Belief is not The Way, that we shouldn’t have to
constantly recalibrate our expectations in order to remain upbeat and positive.

At what point is enough enough?At what point do you just say no, I’m not
going to do this vile shit anymore?At
what point do you stop breaking yourself into pieces and then reassembling it
all into something grotesque and monstrous, a cruel mockery of something
beautiful and pure and true?Because
even though Frankenstein’s monster walked like a man, breathed like a man and
even occasionally made grunting noises like a man, he was not a man.He was a resurrected corpse, hastily and
monstrously stitched together and reanimated with insanity in order to fulfill
the desperate needs of a mad scientist too broken to understand and accept
reality.Well, we are Frankenstein’s
monster, hideous and broken, twisted and ugly, a horrible mockery of the real
thing, staggering through the village, drowning children and grunting that we
still believe in . . . in . . . I don’t even know what.Certainly not the present.The Lions will be lucky to finish 7-9 given
the way they have played so far and the brutal schedule which awaits them.Is 7-9 in year four worthy of our fake
plastic smiles?

Is it the future?Is
that what we’re supposed to place our Hope and Faith in?Because from everything I see and everything
I feel the window to that future has pretty much slammed shut.Call me hysterical.Tell me I’m overreacting.Frankly my dear I don’t give a fuck.These guys just don’t get it.They.Just.Don’t.Get.It.Ndamukong Suh doesn’t get
it.Nick Fairly doesn’t get it.Titus Young doesn’t get it.And worse, Matthew Stafford might not get
it.Jim Schwartz really doesn’t fucking
get it.Here is something incredibly
harsh left by Lord Anonymous in the comments section following last week’s
shitfest against the Vikings:

“How about we not sugar coat this team anymore. I'll go to
the old saying if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck then it's a duck.
This team is not that talented period. Suh is overrated, Stafford is
regressing, and his mechanics are horrendous. Titus can't beat one on one
coverage and if he does it's a 50-50 chance he'll actually catch the ball.
There running backs are average, there offensive line is a pass blocking line
that can not consistently run against 6 or 7 man fronts. Their secondary, I don't
even need to comment on, but lastly the coaching. The Lions game after game
continue to make the same mental errors. The scheme is predictable, and easy to
game plan against. And I don't think they really coach these guys, I think
there is a lot of atta boy, nice unnecessary side arm throw off your back foot
with no defensive lineman near you. Instead of nice td but why the fuck are you
throwing like Vince Young? This team deserves their record and will finish 7-9
the end.”

That’s brutal as hell but fuck, somebody had to say it.And, well, I’m saying it now.This is not senseless fear-mongering, the
kind of chicken-little bullshit that some people pull out of their asses every
chance they get.You know the ones I’m
talking about.Fuck them, but fuck this
shit too.This is a response to
everything we’ve seen, not just this season, but last season too.I loved last season.I’ve said that all along and I stand by
it.I loved it for what it promised, for
everything that it hinted at.But some
people are retroactively using it like a goddamn live preserver, acting like
that was everything we ever wanted all along.And hey, maybe they did, but not me.I always wanted more.I loved it
because it seemed like A Good Start.But
good starts don’t mean a whole hell of a lot if you trip two meters into the
race and fall down and slam your face into the track, you know?And that’s what the Lions have done.

What I am sick of is the coddling Lord Anonymous mentioned,
the oh, it’s okay boys, just stay the course.Fuck that bullshit.You can’t be
so easy on yourself.You can’t allow
yourself to get away with being anything less than what you can be.That is a failure of spirit and if there is
anything we value over all else here at Armchair Linebacker it is Spirit and
the Spirit Warriors who embody it.I’m
sick of this shit.Just fucking sick of
it.I’m sick of following a loser ass
team that never fucking learns anything, that mewls and bitches at reporters
and lashes out at its own fans and refuses to take responsibility for the fact
that it is walking around with a load of shit in its britches.

You won 10 games and made the playoffs.You came back to life from 0-16.Congratulations!We’re all real proud of you.But right now you sound a lot like the
asshole who writes a modestly successful first novel, gets congratulated by the
literati and then spends the next several years fucking around, getting high
with friends, pissing away his advance for his next book, and then blowing up
whenever anyone asks him what the fuck he’s up to.“Leave me alone, can’t you see I’m a
genius???I wrote a fucking book!”Yes you did, and now it’s time to write
another and nobody gives a shit what you did yesterday because today you are
just an example of wasted potential and people have no time for that shit.You are a fucking has-been.

Again, hysterical overreaction, blah blah blah.The world of sport moves at ludicrous
speed.If you don’t understand that then
you simply haven’t been paying any attention.You can be an up and coming team at the end of one season and a
cautionary tale half a season later.It
sucks but that’s the way it is.Whining
about it and complaining that it’s not fair is fucking meaningless.It
doesn’t matter how it should be, it matters how it actually is.

But . . . but . . . but nothing.No.No
buts.The longer we continue to excuse
this shit, to coddle, to give this goddamn team an exit strategy every time it
fails in its simple task, which in the world of sport is to get the job done,
to win the goddamn games, we perpetuate this disgusting and vile Lions
Disease.We feed into it.Lions fans making excuses today sound like
Lions fans making excuses in 2007.They
sound like Lions fans in 2002, in 1996, in 1986, in 1976, in . . . you get the point.

I am still open to the possibility that this thing can get
turned around, but it will take a lot of hard work by the coaches and the
players, hard work that frankly none of them seem all that interested in
doing.It’s a hell of a lot easier to talk
about your supposed dominance, to gibber about your potential and the way
things should be than to actually look in the goddamn mirror and realize that
you’ve still got a long ways to go.Ndamukong Suh is an asshole.He
just is.So is Dominic Raiola.Quit acting persecuted because some anonymous
GM has the temerity to call them out on their bullshit.That persecution horseshit just continues to
feed the beast.That fucking GM is
right.These guys act like assholes and
then whine and throw a hissy fit whenever anyone says they need to grow the
fuck up.That is quintessential Lions
Disease right there.It’s fucking
textbook.Grow the fuck up, shut the
fuck up and just play some goddamn good football.

You don’t like what I’m saying here?Well neither do I.I fucking hate it.I hate it with the power of a billion
suns.I want so very much to love this
team but they make it damn near impossible.I’m not sitting here screaming BLOW UP THE MOON or anything like that
because here’s the thing: that’s not gonna fix anything either.And that’s the horrible place we find
ourselves in, this depressing purgatory.There doesn’t seem like there’s a way forward and I’ll be damned if I’m
going backward and so all that’s left to do is just sit down and bawl my eyes
out I guess.Actually, you know
what?That’s not entirely true.There is a way forward.It involves each and every one of these
cocksuckers looking in the mirror, slapping themselves in the face and
realizing that they have to get to fucking work, that they have to stop
congratulating themselves because they pulled themselves and us out of the muck
of 0-16.You did good kids, now it’s
time to take that next step into the real world.It’s time to grow the fuck up.You want to know how to fix this?That’s how you fucking fix this.Each and every player, coach, ball-boy,
executive, janitor, Schwartz’s ball-washer . . . everybody, they have to take
it upon themselves to be better than what they are, to stop forgiving
themselves for being less than what they are.It’s not working and it’s up to all of them to make it work.Not us.We can’t do it and I’m sick of people pretending like if we just keep a
smile on our face that everything will end up alright.It’s time for the Lions to man the fuck up
already and everything else be damned.This is not about drunk driving arrests or classless behavior or any of
that horseshit.I don’t care about any
of that.Let me repeat: I DON’T CARE
ABOUT ANY OF THAT.What I do care about
is that these guys are a bunch of fuck-ups ON THE FIELD.Act like a goddamn savage off the field.Eat a baby.I don’t care.As long as you
win.Win, win, win, win, WIN.That is the only thing that matters.Everything else is just so much noise, and if
you can’t do that, well . . . then you’re just a part of the noise, and Lions
Disease, if nothing else, is exceedingly noisy.

So . . . do the Lions win on Sunday?Fuck if I know.And really, that’s what this whole damn thing
has boiled down to: fuck if I know.And
that sucks, Beavis.It really, really
sucks.

6 comments:

LionsFanROC
said...

I just... I don't know. I still truly believe that this team is ridiculously talented but that they're just a bunch of whiney assholes. They act like things should just happen because they are so potentially dominating.

Suh exemplifies everything wrong with this team. I swear he could literally manhandle any offensive lineman in frong of him 90 percent of the time... He just doesn't. There's no consistency and clearly nobody is holding anyone else accountable. Or holding themselves accountable for that reason... Maybe that's what Delmas is. Maybe more than energy he's the guy that makes everyone do their fucking job.

I don't know, but I'm tired of watching shitty football every week. Even when they win, it looks AWFUL. It looks like they're overachieving just to beat another team with their come from behind heroics. No, enough. Just fucking destroy someone (JAX doesn't cound). Someone good. When they do that, we'll talk. Until then I'll continue to believe this group is going nowhere.

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